Like the work of her mentors, James Tate and Dean Young, Shapiro’s poetry is meant to be experienced rather than understood. Speaking to the editors of Jubilat, Dean Young remarked that “to tie meaning too closely to understanding misses the point.” Shapiro’s writing is often untied, yet vivid in its sharp descriptions and loopy wit. There’s a crazy pleasure in following these wild associations where humor remains one of the more tangible rewards. In “Nothing Is More Beautiful When You Try to Make It that Way, Joan Rivers,” we learn that aging celebrities are negotiating to sell a sex tape of “their famous bodies / grinding into each other like hard candy.” Then we hear “you’re not supposed to eat / rock candy, just look through it to see / how pink and crystalized the world becomes.”

“Coming to That is the perfect fulfillment of an artistic life—to live very long and deliberately, to maintain a sharp mind and serviceable body, soaking up a multitude of paintings, films, plays, ballets, operas, books, songs, poems (and, yes, champagne) and bringing it to bear on one’s creative endeavors, right to the very end and into the future.”

3 Good Books invites writers & artists to share their favorite books on a given theme.

“There are dozens of good books involving sport fishing, and many of our greatest authors have found in fishing some of life’s happiest and most painful moments,” notes Hughes, who admits difficulty in narrowing his favorite books on fishing. “Chekhov, Yeats, Ted Hughes, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, to name but a few, loved to fish and write about it. Among those essayists who write specifically about fishing, I count David James Duncan, Ted Leeson, Marjorie Sandor, and Thomas McGuane as the best.”

This Everyman Library’s Pocket edition, edited by Henry Hughes, is a warm, witty, and wise collection of excellent verse in which some aspect of the angling passion, or some brooding over rivers, arises and plays itself out.

From Cloudbank Books: Oregon Book Award-winning poet Henry Hughes journeys with master artist Paul Gentry to explore Oregon and the state of America. They create a conversation that is moving, thoughtful, politically engaging and refreshingly playful

What people are saying about Shutter Lines:

“Henry Hughes is one of the great Northwest poets in top form, and now with Paul Gentry and his extraordinary photographs, we get an amazing, unforgettable collection.” —Willy Vlautin

“Photography, poetry, fiction, film—it’s all the same job—to find the right detail that says it all. The resonant details in Gentry’s photographs have leapt into Hughes’ fine writing, bringing people to life and those lives into sharp focus.” —Christopher Rauschenberg

“I like Steinbeck’s work, always have. America seen from close to the ground, nothing fancy, just real. That’s what I get out of Henry Hughes’ writing. Paul Gentry’s photos beautifully echo this writing—they seem to have a loneliness to them, a quietness, too.” —Rick Bartow

“The collaboration in Shutter Lines is so complete that the photographer has come to work like a poet and the poet like a photographer. This book is innovative, investigative, and insightful.” —David Biespiel

Ted Leeson makes the disclaimer that he is just a “seasonal resident” who for over twenty years has spent several weeks every summer living above and fishing the Madison River in southwest Montana. “And if my familiarity with the place runs only skin-deep, I am satisfied, for it is our skins that wrap us in sensation.” Leeson’s distance, humility, acute sensitivity and tail-flipping wit make Inventing Montana a fresh, humorous, and insightful book on a region that is reverently fished, camped, explored, and over-described. “Montana” is, after all, just “a word that closes distances, a name for a curved roof of sky and a place fashioned beneath it.”

“Collecting poetry from around the world, Hughes has assembled an anthology that not only portrays the differences of various fishing cultures, but of particular eras, whether it be ancient China or present day America.”